Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Problem

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

Joe Biden has been having a rough go of it lately. On Wednesday, 10 days after telling a crowd in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania that he "ended the pandemic," the president tested positive for COVID-19 for the third time in the past two years.

The news would be unwelcome for any 81-year-old, but for Biden, it is particularly bad, coming after weeks of a very public meltdown among Democrats about his fitness as a candidate that was sparked by the president's poor debate performance against Donald Trump last month. According to a recent AP poll, two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw. Even senior Democrats reportedly doubt their nominee's ability to win in November and are deeply concerned about the impact his remaining at the top of the ticket might have on down-ballot races.

With the announcement of his COVID infection, Biden was forced to cancel a planned speaking event in Las Vegas, which was meant to shore up support among Hispanic voters. The virus will now inevitably keep him off the campaign trail at a critical moment in the high-stakes presidential race. Trump, meanwhile, has been enjoying a respite from coverage about the controversial Project 2025 plan for his second term following an unsuccessful assassination attempt by a shooter whose motive remains unknown.

Frustrating as it may be for the president, this latest wound is self-inflicted.

Biden swept into office in 2020 on the promise of controlling the pandemic and eliminating the virus. The public health crisis, which had claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives by Biden's January 2021 inauguration, had exposed Trump and left him weakened.

As the crisis spiraled out of control, voters saw through their president's strongman bravado and saw man in denial, self-serving and unsteady, with no plan or apparent interest in the public good. Trump's downplaying of the crisis, repeated assurances that the virus would go away on its own, and promotion of junk science caught up with him in October 2020 when he himself was hospitalized for COVID.

That was likely when the presidential race was decided. Weary, afraid, and increasingly frustrated by erratic leadership, Americans opted for Biden, who had been vice president during the more predictable Obama years, and promised to follow the science.

But four years later, Biden finds himself in a parallel situation. The president's COVID diagnosis–and the fact that the nation is in the midst of yet another wave of a pandemic that our government has declared over–highlights a troubling record on public health that has cost him precious leverage against his opponent.

To Biden's credit, his administration did roll out the vaccines, which had been in development under Trump and aided by Operation Warp Speed. The jabs have saved millions of lives, providing robust protection against severe illness, death, and–more recent evidence suggests–long COVID, a potentially debilitating condition a recent estimate suggests occurs in 3.5 percent of cases.

But there is another side to the president's COVID response: the rush declare victory over the virus while ignoring the pandemic's realities.

On July 4, 2021, for example, with the delta variant spreading, Biden announced that "independence from COVID" was around the corner. Five months later, as the omicron wave was surging across the country, Biden boasted in his jobs report that he'd "got people out of their homes and back to work, even in the face of wave after wave of COVID." Omicron would kill 120,000 Americans between January and February 2022.

Biden's strategy to deliver normalcy has relied almost exclusively on vaccinations to the point of downplaying the need for non-pharmaceutical measures that had been effective at driving down cases early on in the pandemic. The president is no longer seen wearing a mask–even boarding and stepping off of Air Force One to isolate with this new bout of COVID. September, he made a joke out of not masking in public.

In addition to the president deemphasizing the need for personal protective equipment, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has yet to protect Americans with universal workplace safety rules aimed at preventing COVID like indoor air quality standards.

On Biden's watch, relief from coronavirus response bills like the CARES Act, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), and the American Rescue Plan has also been allowed to expire–as have the emergency declarations. Student loan repayment and evictions have resumed and the stimulus checks have ceased.

For millions of Americans, the loss of relief has meant more struggle–even as real wages increase. For example, the FFCRA required states to maintain Medicaid coverage for most of their enrollees and prohibited termination for the duration of the public health emergency. But now that the emergency has ended, millions have been kicked off of Medicaid, including children.

Biden's CDC has gone along with the normalcy push, even drawing criticism from public health experts. For example, after its decision to shorten COVID isolation guidance from 10 days to five,  Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, accused the agency of putting politics over public health. Dr. Lucky Tran, meanwhile, a science communicator based at Columbia University, warned that the new guidance would be misused by employers to pressure sick workers back into workplaces, writing "That's bad policy, no matter how much you claim you are ‘following the science.’”

Today, even the CDC's five-day guidance has been eliminated.

In measuring the success of the Biden pandemic strategy, the numbers speak for themselves. While significantly fewer people are dying today from COVID than were in March 2020, and long COVID rates may be declining, the immunocompromised and vulnerable Americans still face unwarranted risks and challenges in daily life–in the absence of government action–to protect themselves from what is fundamentally a preventable disease.

Moreover, the improvements we have seen have come at a high price. As of this writing, roughly 1.2 million Americans have died from the virus and millions more are suffering long COVID. Of those that died, roughly twice as many have done so on Biden's watch than on Trump's–and most within the president's first two years in office. On May 4, 2022, when the nation crossed one million COVID deaths, Biden actually led Trump in average weekly deaths by about 1,200. Even if we attribute the deaths that occurred in the first five months of Biden's term to his predecessor, which may be fairer to the president considering the mess he inherited, he still leads by 690.

Looking back now, it is conceivable that in an alternate timeline, Trump's pandemic mismanagement and the 400,000 American deaths he presided over end his political career. But in this timeline, Trump's failures are four years in the rearview and blunted by Biden's. At their debate, Trump even pointed out their respective COVID death numbers.

According to a note from Biden's physician, the president, who took the oral COVID medication Paxlovid, is currently only experiencing mild respiratory symptoms with no fever. But while the president is recovering, his candidacy may not. With just three months left to campaign, Biden's problems spell potentially serious trouble for Democrats in November.

More on the 2024 Election

• "If a presidential nominee drops out, what happens to states' ballots?" from States Newsroom.
• "Megadonors are plotting how best to change Biden's mind," from The New Republic.
• "Biden tests positive for COVID, cancels Las Vegas event," from Nevada Current.
• "Reality rudely follows Biden to Las Vegas," also from Nevada Current.
• "Why are Bernie Sanders and The Squad propping up Joe Biden?" from The Nation.
• "Donald Trump's near death moment has reenergized his movement," from Jacobin.

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